Elizabeth Taylor, seen here in the 1948 film A Date with Judy, translated her on-screen magnetism into a series of fragrance blockbusters.From the Everett Collection; digital colorization by Sanna Dullaway.

In 1991, to promote her second perfume, White Diamonds, the then 59-year-old actress Elizabeth Taylor appeared in a black-and-white television commercial, dripping in jewels. As a group of high-rolling men plays a tense game of poker, Taylor drops one of her heavy diamond earrings into the kitty. “These have always brought me luck,” she purrs. The message was clear: White Diamonds was the scent of mystery, of opulence, of owning so many baubles that you could simply give them away. Parfums International, Taylor’s fragrance partner, celebrated the launch with department-store screenings and tiny bags of popcorn.

White Diamonds was not the first celebrity scent—in 1914, the silent-film star Alla Nazimova fronted Caswell & Massey’s Marem; Audrey Hepburn teamed with Givenchy on the 1957 L’Interdit; Sophia Loren released her eponymous perfume in 1981—but it was by far the most successful, a juggernaut in a bejeweled bottle. (A 2010 report stated that White Diamonds earned more than $60 million in that year alone.) The scent—an overdose of rose and jasmine, with champagne-fizzy aldehydes—was an extension of Taylor’s appeal, the glamour and inaccessibility of it. She made “celebrity perfumes” into a viable category because her fame was so outsize, she could afford to siphon off a bit of sparkle.

In the years since, there have been hits and misses. Britney Spears, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Paris Hilton have built booming fragrance empires, while other stars (Pharrell, Jennifer Aniston) have seen their scents fade on the shelves. A market analysis from 2014 reported a 66 percent drop in sales of celebrity-branded perfume over the preceding three years. So, what is the future of star-powered spritzes?

Michelle Pfeiffer thinks she has the answer. The actress, 61, has a new collection of scents called Henry Rose (after her children’s middle names). Notably, it is the first high-end perfume line to be certified by the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog organization that monitors toxicity in the beauty industry.

We live in a time of Moon Juice, mindfulness, and self-care—a shift that Pfeiffer sees as antithetical to scents that often contain problematic ingredients (styrene, for one, is often listed as potentially carcinogenic). Still, when she started developing Henry Rose, in 2010, many told her that her idea for sophisticated, chemically safe perfume was impossible. “I talked to an agency about wanting to do this, and they looked at me like I had three heads,” she recalls. “They said celebrity fragrances are in the toilet, nobody trusts them, and that I’d never get anyone to be 100 percent transparent.”

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Fortunately, Pfeiffer says, the market finally caught up. (Henry Rose lists every ingredient plainly on its website.) The next hurdle was creating complex scents from a pared-down palette of roughly 300 notes that she and her chemists deemed to be clean. The five fragrances (unisex, though they skew creamy and floral) each reflect an olfactive memory; Torn, a vanilla patchouli typically found on Pfeiffer’s wrist, nods to her father’s love of Old Spice.

Henry Rose is not a bombastic line—the Scarface actress will not be dripping in diamonds anytime soon. But even as pop stars churn out candy-floss scents, perhaps this is where celebrity perfume is headed: more passion project than marketing ploy. Here, the famous name isn’t in the spotlight. It’s not even on the box.